Women Law Students at University College
Leslie Howsam
In Bloomsbury during the 1870s and 80s, a few women began to study Law at University College London (UCL). There they dreamed of breaking down the formidable barriers preventing female entry into the legal profession. Academic study was not forbidden but setting up a practice was. Women did not become barristers or solicitors in Britain for over forty years, until the Sex Discrimination (Removal) Act of 1919.
But the academic barrier was broken much earlier, first when sensible and progressive male professors allowed women to sit in on their lectures and later when the University deigned to award the relevant degrees. This essay explores what happened to a few of the first women to study Law in Bloomsbury, whether or not they completed the degree of LL.B. If custom dictated they could not be called to the bar as barristers, and the law said they could not join the Law Society as solicitors, it’s worth asking what they ended up doing?
Universities that were new in the nineteenth century were more welcoming to women students than the ancient institutions at Oxford and Cambridge. In 1868 the University of London offered a Special Examination for Women. There were only nine candidates; six of them passed and were permitted to continue their studies (although at that point women could still not earn degrees).
One of these “London Nine” went on to become the first woman in Britain to earn a Law degree. As we recognise and celebrate her and her colleagues, it’s important to remember how extraordinary and isolated was their experience. It’s hardly surprising how few women studied law at any university in late-Victorian Britain, since everyone knew they would not be allowed to enter the profession and there was little hope that the situation would change any time soon.
Eliza Orme (1848-1937) began her studies in science before moving into Political Economy (where she won a prize and competed for a prestigious scholarship that she should have won –but it was not open to her as a woman). Around the same time that she began studying Law, she wrote to Helen Taylor and John Stuart Mill, stating her ambition to become a lawyer: she thought women clients would benefit from having their position explained by sympathetic professionals. She also identified law as “a lucrative profession which ought to be open to women”. In the same letter, she began her strategy for women’s entry. Firstly, Orme obtained a place as a pupil in the chambers of a barrister at nearby Lincoln’s Inn, John Savill Vaizey. A fellow student, Mary Richardson, joined her there. Their male counterparts in pupillage would have been able to “eat their dinners” at the Inns of Court and then be called to the bar. Since the Inns of Court refused to admit Orme to those privileges, she took the advice of another barrister, Phipson Beale, and set up her own chambers in Chancery Lane. This was the legal district, just a stone’s throw from Bloomsbury and the Inns. All this took about three years. In their own chambers the two women developed a lucrative unofficial business, using their legal training as they drafted documents and did other work on behalf of Vaizey, Beale and other barristers. Richardson later left the business and Reina Emily Lawrence joined it. While all this was going on, the women continued their legal studies, and in 1888, Eliza Orme was awarded the degree of Bachelor of Laws (LL.B.).
Orme continued her quasi-legal work – acting as a property conveyancer, drawing up deeds, doing real-estate work as director of a building society, serving as a patent agent –while becoming politically engaged. She was an active and committed supporter of women’s suffrage, and an ardent Liberal, becoming a founding member of the Women’s Liberal Association (WLA).
It was important for her to have a public profile. She both lectured widely for the WLA and encouraged other women to speak in public. In 1892, around the time that the WLA split over whether women’s suffrage should, or should not, be Liberal party policy, Eliza Orme took up a new professional task. She was “Senior Lady Assistant Commissioner” for a Royal Commission on Labour, reporting on women’s work as barmaids and in the iron industry. She later sat on the government committee on prison conditions and wrote about how they could be improved. For Orme, law meant not only the day-to-day work of a legal chambers but also the kinds of opportunities that such work often led to for men in the profession – political engagement, government service and journalism.
Mary E. Richardson (dates unknown) started her career in law, studying and later working alongside Eliza Orme. She entered UCL in 1876, but did not graduate. In partnership with Orme, she acted as a Patent Agent and they were both directors of the Nineteenth-Century Building Society. Richardson too was interested in women’s rights and in politics, but, in her case, ran successfully for election to the London School Board (1879-1885) and apparently remained attached to the Chancery Lane office during her period of service. In the late 1880s she became a businesswoman, taking over a shopping emporium in the Chiswick suburb of Bedford Park. She moved to Cornwall in 1895, engaged in literary work, and eventually became a parish councillor. It’s not clear what Richardson’s motives were, whether she left legal work because it was unsatisfactory or disappointing, or whether she was drawn to local politics and later to business in preference to drawing up documents for someone else to sign.
Reina Emily Lawrence (1861-1940) joined the Chancery Lane office around 1888. She too studied Law at UCL, earning her LL.B. in 1893 as the second woman graduate in that discipline. Lawrence and Orme were lifelong friends but, like Richardson, Reina Lawrence made local government her ambition. She worked in voluntary organisations on behalf of unemployed and impoverished people and, in 1905, was elected as a borough councillor. In the campaign, her stated interests were housing, swimming baths, and infant mortality, and she informed voters that she was not a suffragette. Lawrence served 1905 to 1909 but lost re-election. She was a trustee of the Mary Macarthur Home and, during World War One, a member of the Central Committee on Women’s Employment. In later life she remained involved with various social service organizations.
These are three of the handful of women who studied Law (and some who graduated) in Bloomsbury at UCL in the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s. Perhaps the careers of the others were even more varied. It should not be too difficult for a researcher to find out some of their names; the challenge will be to trace what they did with the rigorous education they were not permitted to use in the conventional way. In the twenty-first century there are plenty of legally trained people who put their education to work in other fields but they would surely acknowledge that the nature of law, as an academic discipline, has shaped their ways of thinking and of approaching the world. It would be good to know more about the women whose thinking was similarly shaped, back in the tumultuous decades of the first wave of the women’s movement.
There were several professors at UCL who welcomed women students to their classes and who mentored people like Orme, Richardson, and Lawrence. No doubt there were others who set barriers in their way but perhaps they were fewer than at some institutions. The other great advantage of UCL, and Bloomsbury, was its proximity to the legal district. The Inns of Court, where the fortunate men apprenticed to become barristers, were there, along with the law courts and the chambers of barristers and solicitors. And tucked in among them, were the chambers where these three women did their legal work.
Leslie Howsam: http://lesliehowsam.ca
FURTHER READING:
Howsam, Leslie; Eliza Orme’s Ambitions: Politics and the Law in Victorian London; https://www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.11647/obp.0392
“Legal Paperwork and Public Policy: Eliza Orme’s Professional Expertise in Late-Victorian Britain”, chapter by Leslie Howsam in Precarious Professionals: Gender, Identities and Social Change in Modern Britain, edited by Heidi Egginton and Zoe Thomas. Published (open access) by University of London Press, 2021. This volume also includes a chapter by Ren Pepitone, “Brother Barristers: Masculinity and the Culture of the Victorian Bar.” https://scholar.uwindsor.ca/historypub/259/
“Eliza Orme and the Women’s Gazette and Weekly News: Editing the Organ of a Fractious Federation, 1888-92”, Victorian Periodicals Review 55: 1 (Spring 2022, 100-124).
Mary Jane Mossman, The First Women Lawyers: A Comparative Study of Gender, Law and the Legal Professions (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2006).
Jane Martin and Joyce Goodman, Women and Education, 1800-1900 (London: Red Globe Press, 2004). See also Martin’s 1992 Open University PhD thesis for more on Mary Richardson.
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